The Change
by B the Blue
Summary: For years Glenn has lived with a curse, but to all things come change.


The Change

Glenn woke to the silent stillness of early dawn. The window adjacent his bed glowed with the soft luminescence of the waking sun. Faint sounds of people talking and enjoying breakfast could be heard from the lower floor of the inn, joining with the distant noise coming from his window, carts moving, businesses opening, people talking as the new day began.

Today would be a new day for Glenn in a more specific way. Today was the day he would be officially knighted by the King and enter into official service as an officer in the Guardian Army. The war against Lavos that had taken Glenn far into the world's future and even farther into its past was over. Won. His more personal war with the Fiendlord Magus, leader of the Mystics, was also over. He had not slain the sorcerer, but the man was gone all the same, into the distant past to search for his sister. With Magus gone and his three lieutenants, Ozzie, Flea, and Slash, dead at the hands of their former leader, the Mystic Army was in disarray.

Leaderless and disorganized they posed a far smaller threat to Guardia, but this did not mean that the war was over. No, the Mystics fought on, their military may have been fractioned, but it was still a threat, a threat that King Guardia XXI meant to extinguish. For the first time since the war had begun so many years before, Guardia was positioned perfectly to switch the war from one of desperate defense to one of aggressive offensive. The Army would be busy as they drove the remnants of the Mystics off of the Zenan continent, and Glenn knew that his Knighting meant that he would officially take Cryus's position of Knight-Captain and be in charge of Guardia's forces in the fighting to come.

First though, before any fighting was to be done, he had to get Knighted, and before that he had to get dressed. Standing groggily Glenn yawned as he stepped into his travel worn trousers. He paused in confusion as the pants stopped at his upper thigh, too tight and short to reach any higher. Kicking the too tight clothing off Glenn realized that his small clothes too were uncomfortably tight.

Glenn frowned, clothing did not shrink over night, but unless he'd miraculously grown then that was the only explanation. Someone might have been able to replace his clothing as he slept, thought he severally doubted any other than the most skilled in the art of stealth could have gotten into his room without alerting him, but it was impossible that they'd have been able to replace his small clothes without waking him. Curiously he picked the trousers off the floor to examine them. They were no doubt his, underneath the left knee was a small patch where he had mended the pants himself. Still, there was something decidedly off. Something wrong about what he was seeing.

Glenn's breath caught in his throat as sudden realization struck.

The pants weren't the thing that was wrong, it was his hand. The green amphibious skin of his hand and arm was the color of flesh. Human flesh. Glenn dropped the clothing with a start and stared numbly at his hands and arms, then as his mind struggled through the shock, down to his bare legs and feet. Human. All of it.

Glenn leaped out of his bed and stumbled clumsily on legs that were far less springy than the ones he'd had only the night before, over to the wooden dresser in the far side of the room. His hands trembled as he lifted the small hand mirror that sat there up to his face. The face which looked back at him from the reflective surface was one he hadn't seen in years. It was his own face. The face of a man, a human man, named Glenn, and not that of the anthropomorphic Frog who he had been ever since the day that Cyrus had died.

With an effort Glenn forced his hands to stop shaking, so that he wouldn't drop the mirror, and continued to stare in shocked silence for minutes before setting it back down onto the dresser. He was human again. His face was the same as it had been the last time he'd seen it before his transformation, if a little older, and the only differences other than that were his hair and eyes. Whereas before they had both been a dark shade of brown, they were now a bright green, the only remaining evidence that he'd only the day before been a frog and not a man.

Glenn realized that he was laughing. The curse was gone! Broken though he had not killed Magus! How he did not know. Perhaps Magus had done something to lift it, or perhaps the fact that the sorcerer had gone far into the past meant that he had now been dead for thousands of years. Either way it didn't matter. The curse was gone.

He had changed back.

Sitting back down onto the side of the bed, Glenn continued laughing as tears of mirth and joy stung his eyes. Today was a new day for him. Today was the day he would in truth become a Knight, and today was the day he had become, once again, a human.

_Author's Note: I wrote this a while ago as a prologue to a Glenn-centric Chrono Trigger sequel set in the middle-ages. Unfortunately inspiration has yet to strike and I still don't have any solid plot ideas. So I've decided to publish this for now as a stand alone short story. That said I might absorb this into a larger fanfic at later date. _


End file.
